The article compares some core aspects of Enactivism (REC version) with Ecological Psychology (on the basis that Fultot et al. reflects it), they find disagreement and puts forth a decision between two aspects of EP -one amenable to REC, the other not. The one that isn’t is thankfully not a position held by EP, which makes it seem like the two are compatible (at least on these points). See below for extracts. Finally: The below is an attempt at understanding each other better, I like Enactivism, I think we can mutually benefit each other -but we need to know each other’s positions better. Also, I am not a representative of the entire discipline, nor do I claim to know it. But, this is a beginning to a discussion across fields so we can benefit from each other! (I hope if I mischaracterize Enactivism that you will help me too!)

p. 1 “The first thesis essentially says that all forms of basic cognition are “concrete spatio-temporally extended patterns of dynamic interaction between organisms and their environment ” (Hutto & Myin 2013: 5).”
If you take this quote out of its context of an Enactivism paper, you would need to be citing Gibson (1966, 1979) here and Chemero (2009), as it is a very close definition to how the concept of Affordances is used in EP. I.e. it being a relation within and/or between organisms and environments (this language can be tightened up though if you want, like niche and habitat (Baggs & Chemero, 2018). This is good news, because if it is a central tenet then there is hope we have amenable approaches.

p. 2 “Sensorimotor contingencies are the lawful ways in which sensory stimulation changes as the organism moves or acts in the environment . In perception the organism exploits these sensorimotor contingencies to find its way around the environment.”
I do not know the definition of sensory stimulation in Enactivism, if they mean the traditional behaviorist/representationalist sense that stimulation is the basis of perception, then I disagree. I believe this leads to a path down needing representations/content etc in the brain to build up whatever it is that we “see”. Due to Direct Perception, I cannot accept that. If they mean sensory stimulation the way that Gibson (1979) does, then the next point of issue is the exact definition of sensorimotor contingencies (SMCs) in general. Are SMCs the change in perspective? The change in perspective plus the change in layout that this brings with it? The change in all of the above plus the new changes in action that it also brings with it? The EP way of bringing about lawfulness is through specificity which can be found in Gibson (1979), Turvey, Solomon and Burton (1990), Stoffregen and Bardy (2001) and Chemero (2009) (and there are more…). Specificity is a debated term, what is included, what isn’t, but as a basic definition we need (in the case of vision) light that bounces off a bunch of stuff in the world, making it structured in different directions, this structure is referred to both as an ambient optic array, and information. Information here is not content. Never content. Ever. But with our visual perceptual system (which includes the entire body, not just the eyes) we have evolved to detect differences and changes in this structure. Information is argued by some to imply necessarily an animal, some don’t, yet others argue it doesn’t really matter if it does or not… For all that I can tell, the quoted sentence doesn’t contradict specificity…

p. 2 “However, from a REC point of view that interaction is always embodied interaction. It is the embodied nature of the organism that grounds the kind of interactions that are possible. Note however that the “body” referred to in the Embodiment Thesis is not our common-sense notion of body but rather the body engaged in non-linear and far-reaching sensorimotor interactions while engaging with certain salient features of the environment . In this interaction the physical body ànd brain areas are in play. ”
Gibson (1966, 1979) you cannot be disembodied. Some of the initial research in EP was driven by the idea that due to the definition of affordances, then our perception-action cycles must bear on aspects of our body in conjunction with aspects of the environment when we enact or perceive affordances. See Warren (1984) for an easy example. Lastly, for EP the brain surely does something, I won’t deny it is a curious structure that does something, but I definitely do not hold a modular view of the brain (see e.g. Anderson’s book After Phrenology about the specificity of brain regions). Now, this last point doesn’t necessarily contradict to Anderson, in that the brain does specific things, however, this to me (in both Anderson and REC) invites too easily the concept of representations if viewed strictly, or content if viewed loosely, as something in the brain, and that the brain does. That is not acceptable from an EP standpoint for very many different reasons. So, it does depend on what is actually meant by interaction, and what is supposed that the brain does, which isn’t explicitly stated in this quote.

p. 2 “All interactions are made possible by previous interactions between the organism and its environment (and recall that the history of interactions may extend beyond the organism’s life-time). ”
Question for Enactivists, I like the idea, if it doesn’t invite nativist arguments. How is it brought about across generations? (I can think of candidate answers but do not wish to speculate.)

p. 2 “The answer is that the interactions affect and change the neural and non-neural body of the organism. In the neural machinery the past experience is sedimented, and in order to explain current interactions this “sediment” is called upon.”
Another question, is REC ok with content either outside of or inside of the body, in whatever shape it takes? Ecological Psychology is not, for either, this to me hints at a real divide if content is assumed anywhere in the system on behalf of REC.

p. 2-3 “There is thus no danger that by invoking neural structure in enactivist explanation, representations slip back in by the back door.”
I want to apologize if I am reading REC unfavorably, but even though it is insisted upon that representations are not accepted in REC, it does seem like REC wants to talk about content without talking about representations. Is that true? Is that possible? If so, it hints again at a divide.

p. 3 “If the net of perception is so widely cast and is constituted by certain types of behavior by which organisms adapt to conditions in their environment, and if it is its aim to find in all these different kinds of behavior a kind of common structure as the essence of perception thus conceived, then it is unsurprising that perception does not depend on neural structure. One may wonder whether trying to find a communal structure to such a diverse set of behaviors is going to result in something genuinely explanatory.”
Firstly, ‘the essence of perception’ is not something that exists, it sounds representational/computational to me. A communal structure is slightly unclear what exactly is meant, I took it to mean that structure does things, but EP wouldn’t say that a structure does things. In fact, the way it is written makes me think it is referring to a fallacy not in EP but in representional/computational psychology due to the assumption of content. Structure, in EP, is of course implicated, but it is not the driver, it is not the controller -because there isn’t one.

p. 3 “Arguably, these are the phenomena for which REC invokes neural structure to explain them .”
This may be our currently dividing aspect, it’s not that neural structure is not involved, I of course think the brain is active, but I do not want to assign function to the brain if I don’t need to. So far, I haven’t come across any behavior, concept, situation, event, that I need to invoke content/representations/computation for. Maybe I will, and then that would be ok in certain forms, but I am going to try to explain things without the brain first, and if I can’t well then it may just be that ‘the brain does it’.

p. 4 “There is, at this point no reason to assume that the meaning of objects is in some way perceived by the organism . But EP makes the further assumption that the meaning is actually perceived through the perception of affordances. The way affordances are perceived is through the invariants in the optical array. The latter (as well as the ambient light at a convergence point) is said to contain (as in “content”) information about objects and their lay-out in the environment.”
Meaning is perceived in EP along with the relation between environment and organism, it is inherent in the term affordances. Since affordances (and the quote of Fultot) insists that ‘behavioral implications’ are what are important to the organism (for whatever reason, based on whatever past, current, and future that the organism is currently acting on). Content, it is never assumed in EP, there is no place for it. If some piece of writing seems to invite this idea, rest assured it is a misreading (or that it is really hard with the language we have at our disposal to say it in a different way that sounds better). Again, information is structure in an energy array, like the optic array in vision, which we can detect if we have perceptual systems sensitive to light (although it is deeper than this). Starting with Gibson (1966) is a good idea and then reading and noticing changes to his 1979 book. But there is a host of theorizing since then up until now also as a previous comment to a quote says (viz. specificity).

p. 4 “The use of the word “about” seems to indicate that information is a semantic notion and thus that information has semantic content.”
This made me think that perhaps the above, and this, hints at that this is a problem in philosophy -I’m a psychologist and I will throw around the word about or for interchangeably, in philosophy it seems to be a thing. Information does not have semantic content (however, see Michaels & Carello’s, 1981, about information about vs for). Content is not a concept in EP.

p. 4 “That Fultot et al. take this semantic road is far from clear, however, we suspect they do (cf. their complaint in § 51 that REC “doesn’t even tolerate content”).”
Fultot, just like me, aren’t representative of the entire field, although I of course understand that their article is the focus of Zahidi and Eemeren’s OPC. This statement, if true, doesn’t generalize to EP in general.

p. 4 “One way to do this is to interpret EP information as co-variance of worldly lay-out in relation to a convergence point and optical structure at that certain point .”
In comparison the the above quote, this one is closer to what you’d find in Gibson and authors after.

p. 4 “In other words, while the meaning of the objects is something objective (which we can, from a third-person perspective, describe), that meaning is not given in perception to the organism, it is something the organism enacts.”
Nothing is objective, objective and subjective doesn’t really exist. There is a commonly used Gibson quote that says that affordances cut across the subjective objective divide, it is both, or neither (1979). I take EP to include and couch behavior in culture, customs, norms, societies, groups, families, histories, futures… the list can be made long. We live in nested spatio-temporal scales. Of course, you can use words as if there is perspective such that, but in the reality of things, it is just a “pole of attention” (1979) and not some, actual, real, perspective that exists in the world. I think EP can give REC something here if my assumptions of REC aren’t too misguided.

p. 5 “For example, in order to avoid falling back on some “impoverished stimulus”-type of psychology, some ecological psychologists like Michael Turvey have swayed in the opposite direction, postulating ultra-information-richness of the media (light, air, …) around us. (cf. A. Chemero 2009: 106-107).”
“Ultra” richness is misleading, it just has a certain richness. EP does not say we perceive light as such when we go about our daily business, but, imagine the number of photons in certain cubic area -yeah it is super ultra amazing rich! But the point is that, we take it so for granted that we don’t realize that this is the norm. Impoverished stimulus is not. Light is incredibly dense, the pure physics of it checks out…

p. 5 “Here, the structure of the optical array determines completely the (behavioral) meaning of the object: there is no ambiguity possible . However, Rob Withagen and Anthony Chemero (2009) have challenged this view on evolutionary grounds.”
This is not exactly true, see Stoffregen and Bardy (2001) in their concept of the global array, and also see the reponses to their article (contained in the same pdf that the link directs to). The global array is a contested concept along with specificity, but it should give some insight into where the debate is. Also, there is ambiguity possible -but not in the traditional sense that would open up for arguing about impoverished stimulus- and also not only for evolutionary reasons, but for reasons you’ll find in Eleanor Gibson’s absolutely stunning theory of development within Ecological Psychology (e.g. Gibson & Pick, 2003). It really is a game-changer.

p. 5 “It merely allows for information available through the optic array to not fully specify affordances . That doesn’t imply a need for it to be supplemented through some type of mental construction. The organism can find out the affordances of the object by interacting with it . When the available (optic) invariant co-varies only moderately with the affordances, so to say, the history of interaction, c.q. learning history, explains the organism’s improved adjustment to its situation .”
Not fully specifying affordances gets tricky technically, other authors including myself, are skeptical about this, because it depends on where you think the consequence might “pop up” if we allow a 1-1-1 specificity (see Turvey, et al. 1990 above). As an example, finding out by interacting is a way of exploring the world for invariants -sometimes other invariants than the ones we first paid attention to that happened to be nonspecifying. See Stoffregen and Bardy (2001) for this, link further up. Finally, see Eleanor Gibson’s developmental theory, it does an excellent job of explaining learning history through differentiation.

p. 5 “With respect to the use of semantic notions, we have argued that these can be banned from EP without loss of explanatory power.”
This is good news because we don’t have anything called “semantic information” or “semantic notion” in our theory =D.

I am interested in the cooperation of Enactivism (EN) and Ecological Psychology (EP). At the root of it, EP has a strong research program, EN needs one. EN has a non-content story about “inside the body stuff”, EP has a non-content story about “outside stuff” (I won’t touch on it here, but I want to use Anderson’s re-use and Raja’s resonance to build a non-content story about the brain). To do this, each approach EN, EP, need to know each other’s literature. I will not propose that I know EN inside and out and will rely on others to correct my misinformed assumptions, but I will also do this favor for anyone interested in EP. Then of course, it should be known that there are diverging opinions within EP and I stick the closest to Chemero’s and Withagen’s understandings (although you should read their literature yourself).

My attempts in upcoming posts will be to try and catch out misconceptions and refer to literature so that we can build a stronger intuition about what it actually is that EP says. I do not think I have the knowledge or capability to be an arbiter of correct EP theory. But, I wish to at least start a dialogue between the fields, my attempt is a well-intended one, not a point-and-blame one.

Over at 4e Cognition Group Anthony Chemero has given a talk (YouTube link) about a couple of interesting new directions that he and his students are working on for their dissertations and a paper. The main impetus is to explain “higher order cognition” through a rECS-able perspective.

The first turn is through Gui Sanches de Oliveira’s Artifactualism approach to models, essentially giving a thorough and solid argument for that scientific models are foremost tools, not accurate representations of the world. If it works, we use the model to predict, explain, plan, experiment, etc. It reminds me of the futile path that scientists often are found on: Focusing on finding The Truth, or finding objectivity. But the world seems to me to contain none, but even if it does, it doesn’t matter, at least not nearly as much as if the proposed model can be used in any applied setting. It reminds me of Nancy Cartwright’s arguments about truth and explanation, how far away those two concepts are from each other -and opting for truth takes us further away from a functioning tool. This is a really important step. Artifactualism rightfully criticizes the assumption that thoughtsare for representing the world accurately, and replaces it with that cognition is for toolmaking. “Explicit, occurrent thoughts are tools, instruments, or artifacts that some agents create and use. Of course, models can meet formal definitions of representations, but that is not what they are for…”.

The second turn is through Vicente Raja Galian’s attempt at defining brain activity through resonance and oscillators. In his case, TALONs as resonant networks of neurons that resonate to certain ecological information and not others, that can continue to oscillate in the absence of the initial resonate -and that can be set in oscillatory motion at a later point in time (again without the initial resonate, through Ed Large’s work). The brain here, is driven by everything else (not the opposite way around). Oscillators, and non-linear oscillators, can act as filters and produce patterns not in the original driver.

Then, we take a turn into what Chemero refers to as slave/master systems, and while those words seem very culturally loaded, they make the point that slave systems wander (drift) in absence of a master system. E.g. circadian rythms stay in tune when we are regularly exposed to sunlight, but when deprived, our rhythms start to drift. An idea connected to that when we do try and use TALONs to think about things, or the past, but because it is not what they (and as a whole, the brain) is for, we just don’t seem to be very good at it. Marek McGann adds “‘Memories’ are constructed on the fly, and confabulation is rife, because it is not retrieval of things, but it is temporary toolmaking”.

Ultimately these initial steps in making more concrete the idea of ‘resonance’, seems very promising. An interesting aspect of resonance, is that it exists on all scales, it doesn’t matter if we look at the behavioral or neural scale, which makes them analyzable by methods like fractals. It makes it an empirically testable theory. Also, with resonant networks, they no longer have to contain content -Anthony Chemero suggests tool-making which will have to be defined further for me to understand if representational content hasn’t just been replaced by Gibsonian tool content. And don’t get me wrong, that would be a wonderful first step in better characterizing what humans do, but I am also currently on a quest for a non-content description of neural activity -and resonance seems to fit that description.

There is some misreading of Ecological Psychology due to the way direct perception and information detection are spoken about. Direct perception seems to carry with it a connotation of specificity (guarantee), that the world is in the specific way it is seen, we cannot be wrong and we have all of it available at once. There is an explicit rejection of the poverty of the stimulus. But pause here a second, because this is what information detection is about.

First, the production of photons exist regardless of my existence. They will bounce around on surfaces, be partly absorbed/reflected depending on surface makeup, and create structure (if we were to put an observer somewhere in this space). In this instance, it would be most appropriate to simply refer to this as the optic array, or structured light. It is not that this structure carries content, it simply is structured (and continuously re-restructured) in a manner specific, and guaranteed, by the surfaces around it and the medium(s) by which it came to any specific point.

Second, for a very long time, organisms have grown to be able to detect such structures. I cannot remember the organism, I think it’s a deep water fish, but a precursor to our eyes was sensitive only to ‘light’ or nothing. Since, eyes seemed to catch on as an important way (in an evolutionary sense) to keep developing, which in our case meant becoming more and more sensitive to the structure that light carries with it. There is no reason to believe that at once, in any given slice of time, that we can perceive all of the structures that light carries with it. ‘We see what we see’ and if we want to see more, we have to explore whatever we are trying to see by moving, to literally detect structure that may be occluded to us from one vantage point (like “illusions”), or, we simply have not looked at something for enough time that we have yet to learn to discriminate between smaller differences in structure in the optic array. I can, in the end, come to the same or a different conclusion about what I saw, depending on the history with which I came into the situation, but also depending on which parts of the array I was detecting, or trying to detect, at the time.

Third, we see and hear and detect pressure and other things at the location at which that information is available (but as you might expect, we do not necessarily detect it, but, we have the possibility to). The firing of cells in the eye that propagate to the brain, never held content, and was always in a ‘language neutral’, ‘symbol neutral’, non-content “signal”.

However. Vicente Raja Galian pointed out that so far, I have yet to assign any function to the brain, and it seems appropriate that we should since it is a curious structure and we have kept it evolutionarily. Keeping a biological structure does not entail function or even importance (in the strictest interpretation of the word), but it seems to me to be a very valid point. So far, I am having issues arguing against that the brain is for ‘where’ (on/in the body) and ‘in what order’. Something is detected at the foot as intense pressure, I look down and see a dog biting it, this (in a sense) creates a loop where whatever signals are propagated back from the retina together with the pressure of the foot are happening simultaneously. There is simultaneous increased firing from two directions into the brain. Solely by being simultaneous in a close (geographically) space, intertwines the two. Experience does not happen in the brain, it happens in the relationship between body and environment, but one thing happening before, after or simultaneously, may come to be through having a space within a body where the ‘where and when’ co-exists. Because a lot of neural propagation going on in the body, in one way or another, travels to one collected structure, the brain. No content is needed, all we need to “know” is where and when, which is simply (although plastic) a matter of bodily geography.

I also have a sneaking suspicion that the brain is for drawn-ness and repulsion, but that currently requires more thought and explication before I feel comfortable laying it out publically.

In search for a non-content perspective of brain activity, I often feel I come up empty handed. Either non-content is not really directly spoken about (e.g. Anderson, 2014, and isn’t really intended to -it does however very importantly free us from other assumptions), or when a positive account is languaged like “but the brain does this or that” is more confusing to me than clarifying. So I’ve been criticized for not having my own positive account, or even a reasonable idea of what I expect or accept as a good answer. So here’s a minimal start.

With a non-content view of the brain, I mean that, any and all activity in the brain is not representational, symbolic, or in any way carries any content in the sense that if I show you a picture of a cat then your cat neurons are firing (simplified of course). To clarify this further, Anderson to me gets close, talking about the brain in a functional sense, non-reductionally. Instead, everything “magic” already happens in a) the continuously ongoing relationship in a given organism-environment system, but importantly, b) in the sensory system(s) (e.g. eyes, ears, legs, body at large, etc.).

All that really would happen after sense-making at the sensory system organs, would be probabilistic (and likely functional as Anderson suggests) networks of directed firing. I mean this in quite a specific way. For example, eyes connect to brain at specific sites, electrical signals propagate from eye to brain at specific sites and an initial direction, but after that, neuronal firing is (due to specific reasons) a matter of what current state immediately neighbouring neurons are in. So, if one neighbour is in post-firing and another not, the latter has a higher likelihood of firing. At a larger scale, what we will see in an image of the brain is a dendritic spreading that at the time is part stochastic (and re-used) because neurons in this sense are non-essential. Of course, if a network of neurons (with part stochastic spread) are firing together, like the oscillators they are, they are more likely to fire together again at a short time scale (they are also likely to fire together again at a longer time scale, but less so. Here is where a lot of the misinterpreting of brain images (by cognitivists usually) exist if you ask me, neurons and often networks of neurons are seen as essential or carrying content so we make a one-to-one mapping between an image of a cat and the specific neurons that are firing -but there are far too many confounds for this to be a confident finding.

Like anything dynamic systems tells us, future (or current) state depends on the history of the system, and because there is no real beginning to any one individual’s brain activation, I cannot bring myself to believe that the brain ‘starts a series of neuronal firings to achieve a body movement’. Body movement is in relation to environment, that’s where the decision is made to move a certain way, that’s where “cognition” is. Actually moving a body part, yes, that is connected to brain firing -but not (necessarily) in a causal manner. Direction, intentionality, agency, mind, is not in the brain, it is in the relationship between organism and environment, a course of body movements is already given by that relationship, at most and only in this sense, is the brain a “mediating” structure.

An aside. Blood flow through the brain is already always ongoing. Co-developing with all our other organs, will also play a (perhaps minor) part in where and how a probabilistic dendritic neuronal network of firing will move through the brain. Then, wherever that was, will need more blood flow (as is the basis of most imaging techniques), however (and again), because the route through the brain is part stochastic anyways, it makes no sense to talk about brain regions, networks, or neurons in any detached, representational, contenty, essential, manner. Re-use, on the other hand, and functional (roughly similar from time 1 to time 2) networks of firing, over time, is what the brain is up to. Because of this, with current imaging techniques, they can get us worse or better probabilities of ‘what’s going on’, and interventions can hit or miss depending on individual and time of intervention. But if you are interested in human behavior, it is probably not the most productive scale or scope at which to analyse it (although there’ll be some absolutely beautiful oscillator dynamics going on at a neuronal level).

The first response ever to anything non-representational, ‘yeah, well, how do you explain closing your eyes and thinking to yourself “I am going to move my hand now” and then move your hand?’ Well, firstly, the question already assumes the brain did it, so it is always an unfair question. But. Nevertheless it needs to be answered. As always, closing your eyes and remaining still isn’t some kind of magical state where you are closed off to the world, you are still continuously co-constituted with it. In fact, I can predict that sentence above to be said because of the type of conversation we are having -the history of the system already determines and constrains direction and force into and with the future. But most importantly, the experience of the “decision” in the ‘word-sentence’ that you are thinking doesn’t ‘come from’/isn’t instantiated in the brain, it is already a decided course due to the relationship between you and the environment that you are in -alike other body movement through the world. I could respond and say “do you know how many people choose their arm/hand to move when we get to this point in the conversation? 100% so far”, that is how constraining our history is (and the direction it already gives us) even on a short timescale. You could respond “ok well now I can think of anything and maybe I won’t even move, just think that I will but don’t”, and we can go around forever in this type of dialogue, entrenching us further into that dissonant attractor state. The last point is, that question doesn’t really tell us what is going on, at worst it is a defensive reaction, at best a curiosity that likely can be satisfied empirically or by appealing to the continuously ongoing activity of our senses and sense-making.

TL/DR: While a valid concern, I don’t think EcoPsych relies on ‘environmental’ content.

I share the worry with Dr. Edward Baggs, that Enactivist criticism of Ecological Psychology’s Direct Perception hints at a possible dualism -even if I think it may mostly arise from reading EcoPsych unfavourably or indeed unfavourably expressing EcoPsych.

The idea is this. Representationalists assume content is in the brain (created and/or passed on from the senses as input). Perception is simply input for the brain-processor which sends output signals to the passive body, hence Indirect Perception, what our eyes see is ultimately not what we experience, we experience what the brain creates (subject to criticism of being idealist and/or dualist, but that’s a different blog post). EcoPsych instead says, hang on, the world is its own best model, there is absolutely no need to conceptualize the perceptual system as mere, passive, input devices, and there is no need to conceptualize the brain as a processor -we need no processing (in the traditional sense anyways). Rather, perception is active and intelligent on its own, what you are currently experiencing is unmediated by any interpretational processes, what you experience is what your perceptual system detects. Perception requires movement, perception and action are in this sense inseparable (your legs, e.g., are also a part of seeing, cue embodied theories). However, importantly, perception is action, action is perception. It’s a continuous and simultaneous loop…

Enactivism asks however, if this means that EcoPsych simply places content on the outside, as opposed to representationalists on the inside. If so, we are not really losing the dualistic consequences that believing in content brings with it.

I think one problem may arrive from reading specificity (roughly: guaranteed perception) into Direct Perception. The straightforward answer here is that this is a bit too literal a take on Direct Perception, although it comes from considerations such that if what we see is the world then why does the world look different to different people -we have access to the same information. A simple answer from EcoPsych would be that firstly we all have different capabilities that we bring to any situation, we inhabit different bodies, we can have different goals, and they all bring effects on what we attend to and why.

Another issue is that some EcoPsych’s talk about properties and effectivities, as if you can divide up organism from environment, landing us in traditional dualisms again. I do not subscribe to this way of talking specifically about the organism or the environment because I think it too easily invites dualist interpretations -but those who do still would say the affordance is primary, that we then can talk about its corresponding parts doesn’t mean that they see them as non-constitutive. Which sounds fine to me, but, I also understand how people can misread this.

As for answering the central question of -do EcoPsychs conceptualize content to be on the outside, I think a resounding ‘no’ is in order. Organisms detect structure in ambient arrays (e.g. the optic array) and they perceive/act on affordances (which necessarily is a relational aspect of the current, and continuously evolving, organism-environment system). The information itself (the structure in an ambient array) is not content, in the case of vision it is (from a specific point of observation) all of the converging photons from all angles (as a whole, continuously flowing) on that point that has bounced off of surfaces where light has been partly absorbed, reflected, etc (which is part of how light becomes structured) that then reaches the eyes. The eyes themselves have evolved to detect differences in structure to the point that was necessary for survival, and we bring an entire cultural/societal/historical as well as developmental baggage with us as we have started naming structures that we are taught from young age to reproduce. But there is no content, there is no standing-in-for the things in the environment = a wooden table is made up of wooden particles which are made up of atoms, when light strikes the top of a dark wood, photons are to a larger degree than a light wood absorbed by the material, but then of course, this becomes circular because we have already defined “dark” and “light” through the property of absorption. (It should be added here that “illusions” where dark and light can look the same, or where a blue dress can look yellow, is only a valid counter-argument if you rely on traditional optics where you discount contextual factors like general lighting conditions etcetera.)

It seems that often in discussions about whether or not a certain phenomena ‘scales up’, or if we engage in abstractions of things, the concepts we talk about take on a life of their own. For example, I see a curious indent in the wall, turns out they are called power outlets and I can charge my laptop if I have a compatible prong. Here, some try and convince us that we have created a new concept, and for every instance we see of this new thing, we add it to the concept or we extract central features and then we go about talking ‘abstractly’ about some kind of general ‘power outlet’ -it has gained its own level of existence. I urge everyone to think differently about this: To deny the assumption that we are creating something new. I don’t think anyone would disagree with me denying that we just created some kind of outer worldly, non-physical, concept. But I think mainstream cognitive science would disagree with denying that we are creating an abstraction. In one sense, it is a mundane counter-argument: we see the first power outlet, representation in the brain created, we see another one, another representation, and/or we start creating a representation that is slightly less specific and only picks out the shared features of the first two. Any way you slice it, this is the work representations do for mainstream psychologists. But what do you do if you don’t believe in representations?

Taking a page out of Gibson’s 79’ bible, I would argue that ‘scaling up’ or ‘abstraction’ is simply a pole of attention. We can take any pole of attention that we are aware of, we can say the word ‘ball’ and just kind of mean a ball in general, we can say or take any pole of attention we want. However. Describing something from different perspectives (poles of attention) is just that. It doesn’t entail an ontological difference in the world. Same with abstraction, I can choose any pole of attention to make things seem general or specific in any which way, I can call a less featureful ball an abstraction that can be applied to the next ball I haven’t seen. But all that is going on is that you are seeing a couple of aspects in a new thing that also are true for another thing -you are not ontologically creating an overarching concept.
If you think we are, I need to be convinced it is not non-physical (enter contemporary cognition and representations and similarity hierarchies). I currently think it may be indefensible. It seems to me that we (EcoPsych/DynSys) wouldn’t need to accept an ontological shift, it is enough to describe it as a shift in the pole of attention, and we can be taught by others or by our own experience of the world to take on a pole of attention we haven’t before, or didn’t know existed, or didn’t want to, or anything else. It does not necessarily mean we have to accept a new ontological status of an utterance. I think most mundane arguments about abstraction and higher level (cognitive) faculties disappear, but not all.

Emergence. Then how in the world do we deal with things that ultimately do seem to create a new ‘level’ of functioning. A termite mound is not concerned with it’s shape, hell, not even termites are, but because of extraneous factors guiding the drop-off of pheromone induced dirt, all of those small lawful actions create a temperature regulated multi-story apartment building. Here, it is difficult to argue that the mound is just a pole of attention, since it clearly comes with new properties that aren’t written into its creation. I think this is a very different thing to talk about. Compare a termite mound to the word ‘honor’. Honor seems more non-physical, seems more like an abstraction, but as soon as you have to apply the word, you are forced to apply it to a specific situation. It is almost an asymmetry, the more abstract a word seems to be, the more specific an example needs to be to understand it -and multiple specific examples can be even more illuminating.

Ultimately, I may just have a problem with the way in which the term abstract is used. Colloquially it means ‘more general’ or ‘less specific’, applied it is necessarily always a specific instance. It seems to me to imply a separate thing with an ontological status (like a general concept), inviting representations. Perhaps it only invites, which saves its usage somewhat, but to me it just seems confusing.

Going to CogSci17 in London this summer for my first research presentation, the paper is to be published in the proceedings (and can be found here). Here’s the abstract:

The actualization of affordances can often be accomplished in numerous, equifinal ways. For instance, an individual could discard an item in a rubbish bin by walking over and dropping it, or by throwing it from a distance. The aim of the current study was to investigate the behavioral dynamics associated with such metastability using a ball-to-bin transportation task. Using time-interval between sequential ball-presentation as a control parameter, participants transported balls from a pickup location to a drop-off bin 9m away. A high degree of variability in task-actualization was expected and found, and the Cusp Catatrophe model was used to understand how this behavioral variability emerged as a function of hard (time interval) and soft (e.g. motivation) task dynamic constraints. Simulations demonstrated that this two parameter state manifold could capture the wide range of participant behaviors, and explain how these behaviors naturally emerge in an under-constrained task context.

One of Radiolab’s older episodes “Talking to Machines” talks about programs that try to simulate conversations. The classic Turing test is that if you are speaking to a robot and a human, and you cannot determine which is human or which is a robot (or getting the classification wrong) then the robot/computer can be said to be intelligent.

Now, I would love to argue a different definition of intelligence, but that isn’t really what this post is about. One of the conclusions from the owner of Clever Bot (a fascinating program that saves whatever you write to it and then is coded to spit back a correlated response -from the pool of existing phrases) is that thinking intensely about AI and conversations is how complex it is to sit in front of one another and have a conversation. The reasoning goes, because it is so difficult to code a program to converse ‘like a human’, then our “coding” must be complex also. It falls in line with metaphors about the brain, giving it ostensible plausibility.

However, haven’t we reversed the reasoning here? Aren’t we assuming in the first place that brains/humans are computational machines, and so it should be possible to code a program for something humans do? It started out the opposite… That we were trying to have the computer behave like a human, not the other way around! Could it not be so that coding a program to converse ‘like a human’ is so difficult, because humans actually aren’t like computers?

If humans aren’t computational machines, then trying to code a program for something that isn’t written as “software in our brain hardware”, is going to be very difficult indeed. But going from the latter to the former is a potentially fallacious way of thinking about it. You could even make the case that conversations aren’t that complex… After all, they are wholly ubiquitous in our everyday lives! We might argue that there are successful and failed conversations, but I’d say they are conversations nonetheless, and very human.